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Jonathan Page

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2023

Stories (114)
Comments
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783 Followers
7168 Following

114 Stories

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Losing Pieces of Myself

Submitted to Contest #224

I haven’t slept in twenty-three days. I know exactly what I want to say, but I can’t say it. Thank you, my love, I can do that, I think. My jaw just rattles up and down like a nutcracker. There are noises, but not the ones I intend. I can’t sleep, my love, I wanted to say, What I wouldn’t give for some sleep.Laurel takes a wet rag and dampens my burning forehead, giving me a healthy sip of ice-cold iced tea, which I try to lift on my own with my shaky left hand, only to send splashes of reddish-orange liquid over the sheets of the bed. At si...

25 likes 19 comments 19
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Bread and Circus

Submitted to Contest #223

“Delivery, delivery, delivery – delivery is everything.” – Cicero * ** How would Cicero have handled this inquisition? Konkle, Whipple, Achebe, Hustis, Buttersowrth, Bartles, and Diamond. They are the Faculty Grievance Committee. I have affectionately nicknamed them the seven dwarves. Because either by nature or habit, each has a characteristic quirk, and they always stay true to character in these meetings. Konkle, for instance, is the Master of Ceremonies and the Disciplinarian. Bartles is the sardonic wisecracker. Achebe is the silent...

18 likes 11 comments 11
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Drawing a Blank

Submitted to Contest #223

I am freaking out. How can I explain this? I’m in a full-blown It's a Wonderful Life scenario here but in reverse. I’m not seeing what the world would look like if I had never been born—I’m seeing the world where I was born—but the joke’s on me.You know, like when a guy walks up to you and addresses you by name and you’ve got no idea who he is. Now, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right. Say, Who are you again? and you’ve offended the guy. Greet him like an old buddy and he’s going to expect you to comment on your shared pas...

44 likes 19 comments 19
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The Study at the Redwood Athenaeum

Submitted to Contest #223

It was a crisp winter’s day in Rhode Island. A perfect New England day, with red maples dressed in gold, plum, and scarlet, their leaves rustling outside the windows like fresh-faced young girls dressed up for a church meeting. Warm light flooded into the cold and dusty reading rooms of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum where Jessie was pouring over an old first-edition volume by P.S. Blackwood.The book, titled “The Trial of Ares,” spoke of nightmarish creatures with seeming immortality, hidden from man in shadowy and remote corners of the g...

16 likes 2 comments 2
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Can’t Go Back

Submitted to Contest #222

Cassidy stands on the square blue carpet of the tumbling floor, trembling. Her muscled legs quake with anticipation, and her diaphragm contracts, bowling her belly out through the leotard to reveal a smothered, held breath. White chalk cakes her hands and bare thighs. The thighs emerge from her singlet, like pistons of white ivory. She raises her arms high into the fifth position. A cloud of chalk forms and particles of powder rain down over her head.She is beginning her floor exercise routine, which starts with a back-tumbling pass—one...

13 likes 6 comments 6
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A Real Ham-and-Egger

Submitted to Contest #222

As a kid I was obsessed with “Macho Man” Randy Savage, but macho I am not. Ever notice how we are all fascinated by stories about our opposite? Take me. I’m a pussy. Not in the sense of being a girly man, but in the sense of being a lazy coward. So, naturally, I am obsessed with Rambo, Full Metal Jacket, Pumping Iron, and any narrative involving one very jacked man fighting his way through a sea of enemies, with certainty of purpose, zero fear of death, wearing his weight in ammo, and possessing an uncanny ability to make everyone in their p...

16 likes 0 comments 0
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A Case of the Useless

Submitted to Contest #222

Your blood test results have come back POSITIVE.  This is something Devin has suspected for a long time. His first thought is to reject the diagnosis and prove that it is wrong. When Devin checks the notice on his iPhone it is 2:38 am. Devin turns back to his computer and continues playing the new fantasy game “Star of Remphan,” in which his avatar is a dark wizard of Druid origins whose spells require a sigil in the form of a pentagram or Star of David enclosed in a magical circle. His avatar is named Austin Osman Spare.&...

16 likes 2 comments 2
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The Library of Disappearing Things

Submitted to Contest #222

Boris Bondarenko lived in a multicolored cottage house in a one-road village in the Ukranian countryside and had the remarkable ability to read every known language. Most of the anointed were marked from birth, but Boris went unnoticed by the Library for years. It was strange then, but also appropriate, given his time in the world, that it fell on him to prevent the whole thing from burning to the ground.As a boy, Boris loved to run through the sunflower fields and chase bees. Boris’s childhood duties included cutting up cucumbers and potato...

38 likes 20 comments 20
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The Devil's Own Children

Submitted to Contest #222

It was just another day in Brooklyn. The spilling of blood was an appropriate offering to the denizens beneath the city whose cries for punition were unending. Eddie “Prime” Pino was driving his Mercedes Roadster with the top down on the Belt Parkway by Coney Island in the gray November dusk when he saw the emergency strobe lights of an unmarked Gray Chevy Impala blare behind him.As he pulled over on the side of the freeway, Eddie reached into the center console and pulled out a Beretta Model 71 pistol loaded with .22 caliber bullets, which ...

19 likes 5 comments 5
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The Giant that Rose Again

Submitted to Contest #221

Failure haunts me like a generational curse. And it seems that every time I glimpse a retirement from the traveling show, my fortunes go up in flames. Every time I imagine putting away my soap box and signing over my many promotions and wonders into capable hands, the world forces me back into servitude.In the days of my first traveling menagerie, my giants were all phonies, but my little people were legitimate. By the time I returned from Europe to present General Tom Thumb at the American Museum on Broadway and Ann Street, more than ten ye...

17 likes 4 comments 4
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Over My Dead Body

Submitted to Contest #221

I sit in the corner of the embalming room watching as the mustached man drains the blood from my corpse. The corpse lies on a metal table, covered in a white tarp. And there is a faint choker of purple bruising and checkered abrasions around my neck. The blood in the tubes is purple-colored, with streaks of black.My irises are cloudy white films, my pupils are fading black lifeless dots. As the mortician hooks me up to the embalming machine with its pump and wires, and the cold fluid enters the veins of my body, I feel nothing. I kind of shi...

39 likes 20 comments 20
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Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass

Submitted to Contest #220

Running along the streets of lower Manhattan, crossing over Centre Street, I kept an even tempo. The sky suddenly darkened as heavy clouds covered the blue sky like spilled ink clouding out over parchment paper.I could have turned back and avoided the storm. But I needed to get my miles in. Post the numbers. Do the work. Think of that Starbucks cappuccino and the warmed-up butter croissant that’s waiting for you.I had already gone five miles by that point. But six miles was my daily minimum. And I was hurting. Right calf cramping. Stich in m...

21 likes 9 comments 9
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Hannibal the Animal

Submitted to Contest #220

Nana was one of those women who was at home anywhere, but the kitchen at Popop’s house was her place. She animated the space. The pots, pans, ladle, and spatula. They were extensions of her flappy old arms. As she moved over the pans, she smelled of lavender, talcum powder, and fresh bedding—mixed with the aroma of spices, ground pepper, parsley, and red pepper flakes simmering in oil and coating the eggs. Her owl-like eyes brightened and her cheeks flushed as soon as she got busy fixing a meal.I was ready for a good meal. I’d been up all ni...

12 likes 5 comments 5
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The Elephant Graveyard

Submitted to Contest #220

“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” — Camille Paglia* * *It is odd how the ionized air of the cold desert night refracts the moonlight, which crackles with the spirits of sojourners past. They seem to still inhabit these barren dunes, trying to speak—the whispers of their urgent warning to the living just out of reach. And the bold moon itself, a dead and lifeless desert, is pockmarked with the evidence of a violent past.This shouldn’t be here. African bush elephants. Desert-dwelling eleph...

28 likes 4 comments 4
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Oh Happy Fault

Submitted to Contest #220

When I wake up, the fresh sea breeze tells me I am near the Ocean. I stretch out my hands and grasp for my gold Spanish pocket watch, but it is not on the nightstand. Seeing the sun peer through a set of heavy drapes, I realize I am no longer at sea but in a hotel suite.“Are you hungry?” she asks, coming into view with a plate of honeydew and canary melons and a lump of cottage cheese. I begin to remember why I am here.The air is thick in the dark suite with the drawn drapes, and she sits naked in her chair, knees up, feet perched, with...

36 likes 16 comments 16
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